Photo Storage Sanity??

[davidedric]

Sue,

I use a similar workflow for the first few steps. Only addition is that I make a complete copy of the images on the card onto a physically separate disk: my straight out of camera sooc collection. That way I can cull with confidence in Lightroom, because I know I have a backup. I have never used it, but it makes the culling less stressful and quicker. Your psychology may be different

Dave

[stevefrazier]

Hi Sue,

Thanks so much for sharing the X key suggestion! After reading your reply, I realize that I had read about it somewhere... but certainly had forgotten about it. Your post processing workflow looks great and I hope you are able to keep up with your shooting.

Wow--that alligator looks big! Nice shot! I was down in Punta Gorda over the Christmas holiday and got a lot of great shots. Would have loved to taken some photos of an alligator but (fortunately, perhaps), I didn't see any.

BTW, I blogged about our dialog on my new website... would love to have you post this information there.

All the best!

Steve
stevefrazierphotography.com

Hi, Steve, and welcome from one newbie to another.

Thanks for your pointers. They helped in my quest to get organized! I took them one step further as well as tweaking the flagging. You might find this helpful, since you were asking about deleting those unflagged ones. Here's what I did with my last two photo shoots:

BTW, if anybody out there has ideas to make my latest attempt at organization more efficient, I'd love to hear them!

1. Imported them directly into Lightroom off my camera card. As part of the import, I create a sub-folder under "2014" labeled with the shoot date and location (e.g., "02-19-2014 Venice Rookery").

2. I go through them immediately and use the "Reject" (shortcut = 'X') flag for those that are obviously not worth keeping, which achieves the same effect as your use of the "Pick" flag, only in reverse. During this same review, I also set the "Pick" flag on those that I think I may want to do some PP on in LR. I leave some unflagged, to indicate that they are keepers and probably don't need much PP.

3. I select "Delete Rejected Photos" from the "Photos" menu. Filtering the rejected photos is an unnecessary step, since this command specifies the rejected photos.

4. LR displays a pop-up asking "Delete the rejected master photo from Disk, or just remove it from Lightroom." I press the "Delete from Disk" button, but one could also press the "Remove" button, which would not permanently delete the image from your hard disk.

My next step is to post to my Flickr page, my favorites out of what's left. Since I don't usually want to post ALL of the shots I saved, I do the following:

1. Go through the retained images again, this time setting a Color Label on the ones I want to post to Flickr.

2 I created a filter for that Color Label (and saved it so I could reuse it) and run that filter.

3. I select all and drag all the photos with the Color Label to my Flickr set-up, then press the Publish button.

I'm sure my methods will evolve as I learn more LR tricks (from the great folks on this forum and the many videos available) and get a better understanding of what I really want/need to keep.

Now, on to read everybody else's suggestions!